Speaking of Books... Connecting with Faculty through a Campus Author Series

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Academic librarians are continually seeking new and effective ways to work more closely with teaching faculty. Despite our best efforts, there often remains a gap between the two. Since 2006, librarians at the University of Maryland Libraries have been attempting to bridge this gap through a faculty speaker series entitled “Speaking of Books… Conversations with Campus Authors.” This series has allowed a group of librarians to work closely with individual faculty members to provide a forum for great scholarship on campus and to foster the image of the UM Libraries as a place where teaching and learning take place every day.
To explore the challenges and rewards of hosting a faculty author lecture series, this presentation will begin with a brief history of the “Speaking of Books” series at the University of Maryland. It will then discuss some of the details of planning and executing author events, in the hopes that others can use this information as a primer for how to host their own lecture series. Finally, it will present a few ideas for future directions of such a series.